Lovely day here today; one of those clear, mid-80s, mid-September beauts that you clutch on to and revel in, knowing that it's just a few days before the air starts to crackle, and the leaves with it, and then it's really fall. What better way to take full advantage of it, AND mark a new season of Grey's Anatomy* than to spend half the afternoon down at the local hospital?

I spent the better part of the day waiting inside - in a sunny, spartan waiting room, in a little examination room in which I feared I had been misplaced - to get this new red lump, with intriguingly bite-shaped marks on my forearm checked out. Two and a half hours of waiting, to find out...not very much about the provenance of my wound. They got the slivery black legs/fangs/probiscises out of me, which was convenient; I'm handy with tweezers but my autoclave is busted. I wonder how much I'm gonna get charged for this operation, though. I ended up with some parting gifts - a script for antibiotics, and instructions to put a warm compress on it five times a day. That last part is nice, but redundant. I typically apply warm compresses to my body 12-14 times each and every day.

So, who wants to see some pictures of my apparent staph infection? I figured so much. While I'm uploading a Flickr album of it, go hunt down some episodes of Appalachian Emergency Room. You'll get the gist of my afternoon.














I'm relieved to report that no one came in with items accidentally nailed to their scrotums, a la SNL. But I'm a little sad to report that no one came in with items accidentally nailed anywhere. However, the mountain mama who asked (inasmuch as someone "asks" by boldly announcing that she's going to "put on some cartoons, since there's so many kids in here. Pokey-mon, Shokey-mon, or sumthin'") to turn off the Bengals-Browns game around the 80th minute of my stay nearly made me give up - antibiotics, or amputation, almost waited till Monday.


*I'm just about as interested in the tribulations of Meredith Grey as I am in that other media It girl of the moment, lonelysham15 - which is to say, I'm not. At all. But I guess I'm in the minorities on both of these.